There is no single recipe that fits everyone's needs. But it's safe to go step by step, from basic tutorials to coding practice to understanding more complex code. Invest in a good reference book later when you know you will stick to the language.

As an absolute beginner you could first have a look at these pages: http://www.php.net/manual/en/getting-started.php and http://devzone.zend.com/article/627 Then you could play around with some code before learning a simple but powerful framework like Kohana or Codeigniter.